1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an improved data processing system and, more specifically, to a computer implemented method, a data processing system, and a computer program product for lock contention reduction.
2. Description of the Related Art
In many workloads, such as web serving or database processing, resource lock contention is a limiting factor in performance. Lock contention may typically represent 60% of the time required for a process to complete. Lock contention becomes especially relevant as the computing industry implements more multiple processor based environments.
In a typical scenario of lock contention, an active thread holds a lock and is scheduled out. The thread maintains the lock while not actively processing. Another thread attempts to use the resource and take the lock. This scenario is typically addressed with a technique known as lock boosting. Lock boosting occurs when a thread that attempts to take the lock held by a previous thread, boosts the priority of the thread that holds the lock. Lock boosting does not completely resolve the issue. In lock boosting, the thread holding the lock still gets de-scheduled and rescheduled in a number of scenarios. The problem of a lock being held by a dormant thread still exists.